[GOAL] Re: reducing volume of research publications

Thu Jun 21 13:02:11 BST 2012

I'm all for reducing the quantity and increasing the quality of peer-reviewed 
research articles too.

But wouldn't the way to accomplish that be to raise peer review quality 
standards rather than to raise the quantity of money it costs to publish?

And it's not at all obvious that reducing publication quantity or raising
publication quality is a research access issue at all, any more than peer
review reform, copyright reform, or publication reform are research
access issues -- or at least not in the near-term.

All these ancillary issue (none of them new: publication quantity was
already among the 38 prima-facie worries that have kept researchers'
fingers in a state of "Zeno's Paralysis" since 1995 (when Peter
Murray-Rust says Green OA would have worked, if it had worked!)
See Info-Glut: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/#4.Navigation

But the attempt to reduce publication quantity by putting a price tag
on publication, though it (unflatteringly) resembles pollution-control
taxes, is probably more like the Chinese demographic control strategy
for limiting child births to one per family. (Rather Draconian: one 
wonders whether we can do better than that!)

Besides, a country cannot limit publication quantity unilaterally without
shooting itself in the foot, and benefiting the competition. A typical
"evolutionarily unstable strategy" that quickly prices itself off the
market.

No, I disagree with most of the learnèd opinions being voiced in this
latest round of opining, all familiar ones, all in the self-archiving FAQ
for years now.

The solution is simple, tried, tested, and proven effective,
and it's been staring us in the face for at least a decade: 
Mandate Green Open Access (effectively: ID/OA,
Liege-style) and all the other problems (including publication
quality, thanks to OA metrics) will take care of themselves.

Keep fussing instead about ancillary theoretical issues and we
face yet another decade of needless, costly access-denial.

But the Finch Report seems to have brought all the old
forms of Zeno's Paralysis out of the woodwork again, so it
looks like yet another round of opining instead of opening
lies before us...

Stevan Harnad

On 2012-06-21, at 7:16 AM, Van Noorden, Richard wrote:

> My first email to this list. Hello!
> 
> Regarding Richard Poynder's discussion about funders and universities potentially rationing the number of peer-reviewed publications - yes, I can also imagine this happening in the future. Personally, I think a formal rationing would be insupportable - more likely, subtle pressure could be put on academics to think about how many papers they are publishing. 
> 
> In future, when academics apply for grants, I imagine they would include in their grant application the publishing costs and volume of papers 'expected' to emerge from that research grant. Libraries would then keep an eye on how many papers were being published by which academics, and at what cost.
> 
> Hence the line in my Nature article on the Finch report [http://www.nature.com/news/britain-aims-for-broad-open-access-1.10846]: "Whatever the solution, academics will be much more aware of the costs of publishing. This could, in turn, modify their behaviour, with researchers submitting papers to the journals they can afford to publish in, or trying to publish fewer, broader articles."
> 
> This will be an interesting issue to watch. 
> 
> Richard.
> 
> Richard Van Noorden 
> Assistant news editor 
> +44 (0)20 7843 3670 
> r.vannoorden at nature.com 
> Web: www.nature.com/news 
> Twitter: @naturenews 
> Nature, 4 Crinan St, London, UK 
> N1 9XW 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers but from
>      institutions and funders (Thomas Krichel)
>   2.   Adam Tickel on Finch Report, Green OA and Peer Review Costs
>      in Times Higher Ed (Richard Poynder)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 11:30:43 +0200
> From: Thomas Krichel <krichel at openlib.org>
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Agreement on Green OA not needed from publishers
> 	but from institutions and funders
> To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
> Message-ID: <20120621093043.GA7255 at openlib.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
>  Peter Murray-Rust writes
> 
>> Nature "has to charge" 10000 USD for an open-access paper because it is
>> selling glory. Glory commands whatever price people are willing to pay.
> 
>  Exactly. That's why publishers will stay in business whatever the 
>  fate of the subscription model.
> 
>  Cheers,
> 
>  Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                      http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
>                                               skype: thomaskrichel
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 10:53:57 +0100
> From: Richard Poynder <ricky at richardpoynder.co.uk>
> Subject: [GOAL]   Adam Tickel on Finch Report, Green OA and Peer
> 	Review Costs in Times Higher Ed
> To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
> Message-ID: <4FE2EF35.9090509 at richardpoynder.co.uk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> What I find striking about Adam Tickell's comments in the THE article is 
> his suggestion that funds for publishing will have to be "managed" and 
> that "Quite a large number of people publish a huge volume of papers. If 
> they were to reduce that, it may not make any significant difference to 
> the integrity of the science base."
> 
> It reminds me that when I spoke to David Sweeney, HEFCE's directorof 
> research, innovation,and skills, 
> (http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html 
> <http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/big-deal-not-price-but-cost.html>) last 
> year he said that it was not obvious to HEFCE "that a constraint on the 
> volume of material published through the current scholarly system would 
> be a bad thing and that is why, in our research assessment system, we 
> only look at up to four outputs per academic."
> 
> He added, "The amount of research deserving publication 'for the record' 
> is much less than the amount deserving publication 'for immediate debate 
> within the community' and whereas print journals have met both needs in 
> the past the internet offers the prospect of decoupling the two, leading 
> to a drop in the amount of material requiring/meriting the full peer 
> review and professional editing service."
> 
> This suggests to me a scenario in which universities and research 
> funders follow the Finch Committee's advice: opt for Gold OA and agree 
> to pay to publish papers, but then severely restrict the number of 
> papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Researchers who want to 
> publish more than, say, one paper a year might be told to either pay the 
> publication fees themselves, or to use services like arXiv (or perhaps 
> their institutional repository, or even a blog) for any they wish to 
> publish beyond their ration.
> 
> As Sweeney put it, "[T]here is a question about the point of publishing 
> material using the full panoply of quality-assured journal publication. 
> Our view is that we should look at research quality as an issue of 
> excellence rather than an issue of volume of publications. I can't speak 
> for the [UK] Research Councils on this but, for us, one publication 
> which is ground-breaking and world-leading is worth more than any number 
> of publications which would be recognised internationally but not as 
> excellent or as world-leading."
> 
> And indeed, that is what the title of the THE article implies: "Open 
> access may require funds to be rationed."
> 
> Richard Poynder
> 
> Stevan Harnad writes:
> 
> 
> These are comments on Paul Jump's article in today's Times Higher Ed.,
> quoting Adam Tickel on the Finch Report, Green OA and Peer Review Costs
> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1 
> <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1> 
>  <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1 <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=420326&c=1>>
> 
> THE COST OF PEER REVIEW: PRE-EMPTIVE GOLD VS. POST-GREEN-OA GOLD
> 
> Professor Tickell is quite right that peer review has a cost that must be
> paid. But what he seems to have forgotten is that that price is already
> being paid *in full* today, handsomely, by institutional subscriptions,
> worldwide.
> 
> The Green Open Access self-archiving mandates in which the UK leads
> worldwide (a lead which the Finch Report, if heeded, would squander)
> require the author's peer-reviewed final draft to be made freely accessible
> online so that the peer-reviewed research findings are accessible not only
> to those users whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in
> which they were published, but to all would-be users.
> 
> The Finch Report instead proposes to pay publishers even more money than
> they are already paid today. This is obviously not because the peer review
> is not being paid for already today, but in order to ensure that Green OA
> itself does not make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering
> the costs of publication.
> 
> To repeat: the Finch Report (at the behest of the publishing lobby) is
> proposing to continue denying access-denied users access to paid-up,
> peer-reviewed research, conducted with public funding, and instead pay
> publishers 50-60 million pounds a year more, gradually, to make that
> research Gold OA. The Finch Report proposes doing this instead of extending
> the Green OA mandates that already make twice as much UK research OA (40%)
> accessible as the worldwide average (20%) at no extra cost, because of the
> UK's worldwide lead in mandating Green OA.
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